Old fogey opinions on modern popular music amnesty

[8ball]

Whenever I go and see a ‘young’ guitar band who I imagine are going to have a big live following with the yoot - Starcrawler, Shame etc - I’m always surprised that the majority of the crowd are old gits like myself - the grey hairs and bobbing bald heads - I think we just got into the habit of seeing live bands back in the day and it’s a habit we, well I, never broke. Just can’t imagine kids following a band round the country as my bro and I used to do with the Clash. Better things to do I guess.

Yeah. Got important TikToks to be watching.

 

[rutabowa]

I'm fairly confident that music will still be a thing in 20 years time

 

[hitmouse]

This could be it, though I've no idea what would cause such an effect?

I mean, scenes are fragile and not necessarily long-lasting things? I guess I would think of places like JT Soar, Temple of Boom, presumably DIY Space for London although I've never been there, as existing within a proper scene and so being more likely to have most of the audience the same age as the bands? I suppose Manchester/Salford's closest equivalents are probably White Hotel and Fuel, and it might be the case that gig audiences there tend to skew younger than average? Maybe?

lots of old musicians too! Tiktok sleeper indie hits

This is making me wonder, if Life Without Buildings played a reunion show, could they easily fill the place up with zoomers? I was going to say Kneecap is a recent show I've been to that seemed to be solidly young people, but then they're a) apparently big on tiktok and b) very much not a guitar band.

I have an idea that music scenes just aren't as important in the UK as they used to be. I think less people are hanging out in gig/music spaces and more people are hanging out at food stalls and markets and the like, and going out less in total. But I don't have the figures to back me up.

I reckon the figures would definitely prove that people haven't been hanging out in gig/music spaces that much for most of the past 18 months or so.

This is a good bit of social commentary performed by some of those young people and it's had 750,000 views, so that must mean something:

Fucking Sports Team, I'd spent months sneering at them before I'd ever heard them, I was so fucking offended when I actually got round to hearing one of their songs and quite enjoyed it. Bastards.

Morning rambling: a problem faced by pop is that short of a new music technology being created everything has pretty much been done, and its a market that thrives on novelty. Music has its limits with novelty and theres a point where tradition takes over from novelty. Tradition (such as 60 years worth of reggae in varying forms for example) isn't a problem for people who love the tradition, but it is a problem for those looking for a novelty to sell and consumers to buy.

Have you read Simon Reynolds' Retromania? I remember that being interesting, and fairly interesting imo, about that topic.

I realised it's also telling that my teenager doesn't really think in terms of scenes, more 'aesthetics', so the goth or cottagecore or dark academia etc aesthetic is a way of dressing but it's not actually linked to your taste in music, hobbies etc. So cottagecore may be all about dressing Laura Ashley style but I haven't seen any particular suggestion that it's supposed to come with liking folk music, jam making and walks in the countryside. It's just a look you like. Similarly, music has become less partisan - if you like a track, you like a track and you don't care so much what the genre is, which is some ways is good in terms of open-mindedness, but some ways means you have less attachment to it, I feel, like it becomes background and you don't really have any strong feelings about it, maybe? I'm not sure one can have a passion about just as song that doesn't feel attached to an artist or their whole ouvre or a scene?

Yeah, there's a lot to be said about how the way the internet and the end of scarcity's affected things - like, my family had internet when I was a kid but it was dial-up, so for my most formative music years music was still very much a limited commodity, if you wanted to buy a hardcore album then that was money that came out of a limited record-buying budget and wasn't being spent on learning about electro or whatever. Very different to just being able to casually stick on a youtube playlist and hear all the most obscure Northern Soul singles that DJs would've traded their children for back in the 70s or whatever.

Although, as a counterargument, are the KPop stans the last proper music subculture going?

Dunno if he'd still agree with me but last time I asked, Cloo 's lad's favourite band was Madness, Will. Baggy Trousers followed by House Of Fun are their best songs according to him. Think he's right, too.

Aye, Baggy Trousers is the best song ever written, that's just an objective fact.

(this is most obvious with Reading/Leeds)

See, I have the opposite response to Reading/Leeds, for a long time I'd see the line-ups and be shocked by the way that it felt like the music from when I was a teenager had been frozen into their lineups forever. Just looked on wiki to check and they had Limp Bizkit playing in 2015, with the Libertines and the Cribs on the main stage, Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the main stage in 2016, and fucking Eminem, Korn and Muse on the main stage in 2017. Always made me go "surely teenagers can't really be listening to this stuff?"

 

[Cloo]

The subculture articles talk quite a lot of the change from 'scarcity' of subculture - from a time you had to go somewhere specific, probably in London, for the right clothes, gigs etc, to a time when you can order the whole look online.

 

[N_igma]

I like the sound of a lot of modern mainstream music. It’s catchy and well produced. The lyrics are fucking shite though. I don’t think there’s a lack of good music being produced, it just isn’t on the radar of the majority of people who consume/pay/stream music these days which are young people.

There was a time when alternative music had some sort of mainstream exposure but that’s gone and will not come back. Does it even matter? As long as people are out there making new music and there are no barriers to hearing that then I’m fine with it.

 

[8ball]

Morning rambling: a problem faced by pop is that short of a new music technology being created everything has pretty much been done, and its a market that thrives on novelty.

Pretty sure this was said at least 60 years ago.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

I'm proper old fogey. I suppose I only really come into contact with mainstream music with Christmas Top of the Pops but Christ it's bland sanitised shite. Where are the proper artists of old. Like Kate Bush. Here aged nineteen entirely written by herself.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

And where's the jokers making a point? This was number one on drug awareness week. These effin' Es are good.

 

[Pickman's model]

I'm proper old fogey. I suppose I only really come into contact with mainstream music with Christmas Top of the Pops but Christ it's bland sanitised shite. Where are the proper artists of old. Like Kate Bush. Here aged nineteen entirely written by herself.

The Tory Kate Bush?

 

[xenon]

I don't really understand why people are talking about the charts, TotP, what's on Radio1 etc. I stopped caring when I was about 14. ...


Also stopped listening to Radio1 in my early 20s as I found it agrovating. Mainly the repetition if you happened to be working in a room for several hours a day with it on (not my choice.) I'm quite fussy TBH so don't bother with 6Music or the like these days either. Actually early new year's resolution is to try listening to a wider range of stuff and stop magpiing tracks, skipping etc.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

The Tory Kate Bush?

I don’t know her voting habits and not particularly a fan either but was just using it as an example of talent of young folk from then vs now.

 

[Pickman's model]

I don't really understand why people are talking about the charts, TotP, what's on Radio1 etc. I stopped caring when I was about 14. ...


Also stopped listening to Radio1 in my early 20s as I found it agrovating. Mainly the repetition if you happened to be working in a room for several hours a day with it on (not my choice.) I'm quite fussy TBH so don't bother with 6Music or the like these days either. Actually early new year's resolution is to try listening to a wider range of stuff and stop magpiing tracks, skipping etc.

never listened to radio 1. did watch totp. i think loads of people make up what they listened to back in the day as i have never heard anyone i know of a certain age who bought anything by ken dodd. yet his single 'tears' apparently the third biggest selling single of the sixties Ken Dodd 'third best-selling artist of 1960s' and watching some of the auld totp on bbc4 over the last couple of years there were loads of bands who charted, sometimes repeatedly, but who have sunk unnoticed and apparently unmissed into the chasm of oblivion.

the sheer volume of utter dross released and doubtless mostly in landfill now surely beggars belief

 

[Epona]

Music isn't what it used to be, it didn't used to have a melody that you could sing along to or lyrics you could clearly hear

 

[krtek a houby]

Saw someone moaning about "girly men" a few years ago when BLT and other K and J Pop bands were all the rage. Thought, FFS, where has you been the last 50 years, you dope. Pop music has a fine and beloved tradition of androgynous/non-binary/keep you guessing over the decades.

 

[Cloo]

Where are the proper artists of old. Like Kate Bush. Here aged nineteen entirely written by herself.

They're probably putting their stuff out online!

 

[Magnus McGinty]

They're probably putting their stuff out online!

Which puts it outside of popular music, or based on my understanding. Which points to the industry being to blame for the dross on Christmas TotP.

 

[Spandex]

Lots of grumbling about the lack of scenes and politics in the kids' music today but only one mention of Grime from crojoe in the last 8 pages. The length and breadth of the country there's teens dressed head to toe from JD Sports blasting Grime out of the tinny speakers on their phones to each other. Grime is often small P political - reflecting the lives and aspirations of young black people in the UK - and occasionally capital P political - Grime4Corbyn. Of course, being a middle aged dad, I don't listen to it.

Separately, a woman I work with's two sons spent the summer just gone 'dancing in the woods'. Where were they? What were they dancing to? Who were they dancing with? It's a mystery to both of us and that's how it should be.

But since this is supposed to be a thread where we release our inner fogey, I'm gonna join the overdriven autotune haters club. When Cher first introduced the world to the possibilities of electronic warbling in 98, sounding like a robot whose batteries were running down, it sounded shit and stupid. Then it became a bit of a thing but that was okay because it was just a passing fad as people played with some new technology and it would receed into the background, only being used to tidy up out of tune vocals, and we'd all look back on it and think that was a shit and stupid fad at the turn of the millennium. Over two decades later it's spread like a virus through hip hop and RnB and dancehall and afrobeats, rendering whole styles of music unlistenable, sounding as shit and stupid as ever. STOP IT!

 

[Pickman's model]

Separately, a woman I work with's two sons spent the summer just gone 'dancing in the woods'. Where were they? What were they dancing to? Who were they dancing with? It's a mystery to both of us and that's how it should be.

it's the sort of thing arthur machen would have had the answer to. easy to imagine the scene, a bit like a more malevolent version of kipling's puck of pook's hill only with pan instead of puck and the panoply of dryads and satyrs and nymphs and so forth instead of the historical figures kipling conjures up dancing away the summer with young people who've stumbled into the revived mysteries

 

[hitmouse]

Pretty sure this was said at least 60 years ago.

It is an interesting question though, is there stuff being made now that sounds properly new and alien, the way the Velvet Underground/Residents/Raincoats/Crass/Mars/Throbbing Gristle/Discharge/Gang of Four/Rudimentary Peni/insert your own favourite reference points here (that's a very guitar band list, but sure you could do a similar one with the disco/techno/house/d'n'b' lineage) would have done? There must be plenty of good records that have come out this year, but would any of them be totally incomprehensible to a listener from 2011? I love Beach House, but I dunno if I'd blow anyone's brains if I travelled back in time to the 80s and played them to a Cocteau Twins fan or something. I suppose there's been hyperpop and the artists that have followed on from Sophie and PC Music or whatever, but again, could you use a hyperpop playlist and a time machine to kill the Pet Shop Boys? I don't think you could.
Ex-Military sounded like it was doing something new, at least to me, but that's a decade old now and by definition every Death Grips album since then has sounded like a Death Grips album. I dunno if Odd Future/the ex-OFWGKTA people count as having done something new, but again they're all tedious old milennials like me by now. I suppose, as much of a joke figure as he can be at times, Kanye was definitely doing something fairly unique with Yeezus? Although again, that's not from the last five years.

Lots of grumbling about the lack of scenes and politics in the kids' music today but only one mention of Grime from crojoe in the last 8 pages. The length and breadth of the country there's teens dressed head to toe from JD Sports blasting Grime out of the tinny speakers on their phones to each other. Grime is often small P political - reflecting the lives and aspirations of young black people in the UK - and occasionally capital P political - Grime4Corbyn. Of course, being a middle aged dad, I don't listen to it.

Aye, but again, following on from my point above, I dunno if grime counts as a new thing - the first Dizzee Rascal album came out in 2003, it's old enough to vote by now. Is today's grime that radically different from 2000s grime, or is it another form that, while it can be fun and make good music, isn't actually any more innovative than like the Las or whatever?
There is also drill, which tbf does seem like a new genre from the last decade, but I think I have to plead ignorance on that one - if anyone wants to make a case for how mindblowingly innovative it is, I'd be interested to hear it.

Separately, a woman I work with's two sons spent the summer just gone 'dancing in the woods'. Where were they? What were they dancing to? Who were they dancing with? It's a mystery to both of us and that's how it should be.

I hate to break it to you but I think it sounds like your coworker's kids are at risk of ending up living at the Faerie Court. (eta bugger, pickman's beat me to it.)

 

[krtek a houby]

Appreciated that this hasn't turned into a YouTube comments thingy, with thousands of stucks claiming that their decade was the greatest and so on

 

[ska invita]

[/QUOTE]

Pretty sure this was said at least 60 years ago.

It may have been said then , but it wouldve been very wrong then. A lot less wrong now though.

There are theoretical limitations to tonal music -a certain number of notes with a limited combinations of ways of being combined to be pleasing.
The last hundred years has seen an unprecedent burning through the permutations.
From a theoretical point of view jazz and classical (where the concerted effort to consider permutations) has blitzed the field. This is aprtly why theres so much atonal/noise etc stuff gets made in academic music... end of the road stuff.

Scales aside theres drums. Again, drum patterns have now been explored to the nth degree. Killer B mention contemporary african music ... Afrobeatz has add a bit of novelty but its far from revolutionary. Moombahton and Reggaeton have been being squeezed for every drop the last few years, but again, its a minor tweek rather than some new discovery. Trap beats, which make up a lot of US rap hits, with their repeating hi-hats the same. It feels like scraping the barrel for novelty rather than some new frontier.

Fringe attempts to reach for complex time-signatures is another sign of trying to escape the limitations.

Then there are the limitations of instruments. Computers/synths etc have given us 50 good years of new sounds, but theres a limit to frequency ranges, and thats been pretty much hit.

Yes there are still possibilities for novel combinations of sound to be put together, but the possibilities of music aren't infinite.
And from a theoretical point of view something may sound "fresh" but still be derivative.

The same goes for painting for example. Only so many colours, only so many forms, before you end up repeating styles and getting away from novelty and into traditions.

The world is a finite place - its the sales pitch of never ending capitalist growth and its dependency on novelty that obscures this fact.

 

[Pickman's model]

Appreciated that this hasn't turned into a YouTube comments thingy, with thousands of stucks claiming that their decade was the greatest and so on

when you get to be an auld fogey you have many decades to choose from

 

[Cloo]

I'm wondering who is downloading singles these days. I never saw the point of singles unless a track literally wasn't appearing on an album, or it had a good remix attached, even before downloads. But when you can listen to mainstream music for free whever you like via YouTube when you have a phone and a bluetooth speaker, I'm really not sure why anyone would download a single.

 

[ska invita]

I'm wondering who is downloading singles these days. I never saw the point of singles unless a track literally wasn't appearing on an album, or it had a good remix attached, even before downloads. But when you can listen to mainstream music for free whever you like via YouTube when you have a phone and a bluetooth speaker, I'm really not sure why anyone would download a single.

DJs do...not sure who else !
I like having music I like on file - cant just remember everything and type it in to a search engine

 

[8ball]

It may have been said then , but it wouldve been very wrong then. A lot less wrong now though.

There are theoretical limitations to tonal music -a certain number of notes with a limited combinations of ways of being combined to be pleasing.
The last hundred years has seen an unprecedent burning through the permutations.
From a theoretical point of view jazz and classical (where the concerted effort to consider permutations) has blitzed the field. This is aprtly why theres so much atonal/noise etc stuff gets made in academic music... end of the road stuff.

Scales aside theres drums. Again, drum patterns have now been explored to the nth degree. Killer B mention contemporary african music ... Afrobeatz has add a bit of novelty but its far from revolutionary. Moombahton and Reggaeton have been being squeezed for every drop the last few years, but again, its a minor tweek rather than some new discovery. Trap beats, which make up a lot of US rap hits, with their repeating hi-hats the same. It feels like scraping the barrel for novelty rather than some new frontier.

Fringe attempts to reach for complex time-signatures is another sign of trying to escape the limitations.

Then there are the limitations of instruments. Computers/synths etc have given us 50 good years of new sounds, but theres a limit to frequency ranges, and thats been pretty much hit.

Yes there are still possibilities for novel combinations of sound to be put together, but the possibilities of music aren't infinite.
And from a theoretical point of view something may sound "fresh" but still be derivative.

The same goes for painting for example. Only so many colours, only so many forms, before you end up repeating styles and getting away from novelty and into traditions.

The world is a finite place - its the sales pitch of never ending capitalist growth and its dependency on novelty that obscures this fact.

While there is a point here, sort of, I think you are off in terms of actual numbers by a few orders of magnitude.

I’d agree that it is a tiny bit less wrong now than it was 60 years ago.

 

[ska invita]

While there is a point here, sort of, I think you are off in terms of actual numbers by a few orders of magnitude.

What "numbers"?

 

[8ball]

What "numbers"?

Well, exactly.

 

[ska invita]

Well, exactly.

Sorry youve lost me - dont understand what " I think you are off in terms of actual numbers " means

 

[8ball]

Sorry youve lost me - dont understand what " I think you are off in terms of actual numbers " means

You were talking about a theoretical n-dimensional space of musical permutations, as if it had been largely mined.

What I think we are actually seeing is risk-averse corporate music dominating the landscape for the most part. To say on that basis that we have kind of “run out of music” is a bit like saying cinema is dead because we have run out of Marvel characters to make films about.

Sure, there are loads of kinds of music that aren’t like this, but when this crap becomes so dominant, a lot of jumping-off points can be left unexplored.

Maybe it’s capitalism that is exhausted, not music.

 

[krtek a houby]

when you get to be an auld fogey you have many decades to choose from

And many dickheads, too, unfortunately